The Man of Letters as a Man of Business | Page 8

computing literary value, and one well
calculated to make the author feel keenly the hatefulness of selling his
art at all. It is as if a painter sold his picture at so much a square inch, or
a sculptor bargained away a group of statuary by the pound. But it is a
custom that you cannot always successfully quarrel with, and most
writers gladly consent to it, if only the price a thousand words is large
enough. The sale to the editor means the sale of the serial rights only,

but if the publisher of the magazine is also a publisher of books, the
republication of the material is supposed to be his right, unless there is
an understanding to the contrary; the terms for this are another affair.
Formerly something more could be got for the author by the
simultaneous appearance of his work in an English magazine, but now
the great American magazines, which pay far higher prices than any
others in the world, have a circulation in England so much exceeding
that of any English periodical, that the simultaneous publication can no
longer be arranged for from this side, though I believe it is still done
here from the other side.
VII.
I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with regard to the
magazines. I am not sure that the case is in every way improved for
young authors. The magazines all maintain a staff for the careful
examination of manuscripts, but as most of the material they print has
been engaged, the number of volunteer contributions that they can use
is very small; one of the greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty in
the course of a year. The new writer, then, must be very good to be
accepted, and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed.
The pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that one,
two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay. If the writer has
not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling his heels in the
courts of fame, or must do his best to earn something at once, the book
is his immediate hope. How slight a hope the book is I have tried to
hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude
enough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or, better or worse still,
if it is a bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not indecency,
there is a very fair chance of its success; I do not mean success with a
self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which does not
personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by it. I will not
talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book which the young
author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an untainted mind,
such as most young men and women write; and I will suppose that it
has found a publisher. It is human nature, as competition has deformed
human nature, for the publisher to wish the author to take all the risks,
and he possibly proposes that the author shall publish it at his own
expense, and let him have a percentage of the retail price for managing

it. If not that, he proposes that the author shall pay for the stereotype
plates, and take fifteen per cent. of the price of the book; or if this will
not go, if the author cannot, rather than will not do it (he is commonly
only too glad to do anything he can), then the publisher offers him ten
per cent. of the retail price after the first thousand copies have been
sold. But if he fully believes in the book, he will give ten per cent. from
the first copy sold, and pay all the costs of publication himself. The
book is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and the publisher is very
well pleased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred copies. Whether
the author has as much reason to be so is a question, but if the book
does not sell more he has only himself to blame, and had better pocket
in silence the two hundred and twenty-five dollars he gets for it, and
bless his publisher, and try to find work somewhere at five dollars a
week. The publisher has not made any more, if quite as much as the
author, and until a book has sold two thousand copies the division is
fair enough. After that, the heavier expenses of manufacturing have
been defrayed, and the book goes on advertising itself; there is merely
the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be